Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Send the report between the adults, by email or through the school system. Do not make the child carry a piece of paper to four teachers and then home.
Carrying a document around all day, remembering to produce it at the right moments and getting it home in a bag is exactly the sort of thing the whole plan exists to help with. Build the system on that and it will fail, and the child will be told off for losing the very sheet that was supposed to help them. Take that job off them entirely.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God wishes to lighten your burden (Quran 4:28). Taking a job off the person least able to carry it is in that spirit.
يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُخَفِّفَ عَنكُمۡۚ وَخُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ ضَعِيفࣰ ا
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak
Qur’an 4:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review looked at automated telephone systems that deliver messages and collect information, used to supplement or replace direct contact between clinicians and patients. The relevant idea is that the passing on of information can be given to a system rather than to a person who may not manage it. That review is about health services and not about school reports, and it does not tell you which system to use.
Posadzki P, Mastellos N, Ryan R, Gunn LH, Felix LM, Pappas Y, Gagnon MP, Julious SA, Xiang L, Oldenburg B, Car J. (2016). Automated telephone communication systems for preventive healthcare and management of long-term conditions.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A plan that depends on the skill a child does not have will fail at the same spot every time.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
An hour exists somewhere in the week for almost anything. That is what makes yes so easy, and it is not the same as having an hour.
Start with less work than they can manage, not more, and add back slowly. Break the long jobs into pieces small enough that each one can be finished and noticed.
If it is out of sight it is gone, so build the system around what you can see. Clothes on an open shelf and books in the drawer is a perfectly good arrangement when that is what works.